Dassault have recently been granted a patent on their approach to managing design hierarchy. I asked them how long it took from filing the patent until it was granted and they said the whole process had taken 8 years. It is a bit of an indictment of the patent system when it takes 8 years, also known as 4 or 5 process nodes, for a patent to… Read More
Electronic Design Automation
nVidia: Virtual Platform/Emulation Hybrid
I was the VP marketing at VaST Systems Technology and then at Virtutech. Both companies sold virtual platform technology which consisted of two parts:
- an extremely fast processor emulation technology that actually worked by doing a binary translation of the target binary code (e.g. an ARM) into the native instruction set of the
Synopsys Creates a High-performance ARC Core
ARC is a family of configurable processors. Originally it was a standalone company in the UK (what is it with the UK and processor cores?) spun out from Argonaut Software. The A in ARC stood for Argonaut originally. ARC International was acquired by Virage and then Virage was acquired by Synopsys so now it is part of Synopsys Designware… Read More
Addressing Power at Architectural and RTL Levels
Major power reductions are possible by reducing power at the RTL and system levels, and not just at the gate and physical level. In fact, as is so often the case in design, changes can have much more impact when done at the higher level, even given that at that point in the design there is less accurate feedback about changes. Later the… Read More
Fabless: The Transformation of the Semiconductor Industry
As I have mentioned before, Paul McLellan and I are writing a book on the history of the fabless semiconductor industry. There is a preview available HERE, it will initially be sold as an e-book on SemiWiki and put into print early next year. Working with Paul McLellan and Beth Martin on this was an amazing experience. The research,… Read More
Webinar: IP Lifecycle Management: What is it, what problems does it solve?
SoC’s are now dominated by IP blocks sourced either from 3rd parties or internal design teams. This means that IP is now critical to the success of the SoC, yet it is part of the design that teams have the least control over, or visibility into. Most design teams utilize at best ad-hoc methods to manage this IP, and the few that utilize… Read More
Using Formal to Find Bugs in ARM Microprocessors
2.5x ROI vs simulation. 25% of bugs found for only 10% of the overall verification cost. 36% of bugs in a current CPU project. These impressive results for formal analysis are what ARM’s Laurent Arditi reported at JUG 2013 after painstaking recording of metrics over several production programs.
As you can see from the above graph,… Read More
I could show you the FPGA, but then I’d have to configure you
One of the present ironies of the Internet of Things is as it seeks to connect every device on the planet, we are still designing those things with largely unconnected EDA tools. We may share libraries and source files on a server somewhere, but that is just the beginning of connection.
It is not surprising that synthesis tools from… Read More
Device Noise Analysis of Switched-Cap Circuits
Switched-capacitor circuits are used in most CMOS mixed-signal ICs as:
- Track and hold circuits
- Integrators
- Operational Amplifiers
- Delta-sigma modulators
Delta-Sigma Modulator: IEEE J. Solid-State Circuits, vol. 43, no. 12, pp 2601-2612, Dec. 2008… Read More
M-PCIe, Data Converters, and USB 3.0 SSIC at IP SoC 2013
Synopsys is taking IP-SOC 2013 seriously, as the company will hold several presentations, starting with a Keynote: “Virtual Prototyping – A Reality Check”, by Johannes Stahl, Director, Product Marketing, System-Level Solutions, Synopsys, highlighting current industry practice around putting virtual prototyping to work… Read More
Rapidus, IBM, and the Billion-Dollar Silicon Sovereignty Bet